Yeah something like that should be doable but it would require that programs provide a schema and the OS to have a way for the programs to “announce” themselves so it can be aware of the configuration files and the schema.

I’m sure some project could create a GUI that could cover the most common applications, though.

It’s always fun trying to set up a program, learning the config syntax, running it, having it fail, and then spending an hour debugging before you realize it never even read your config changes because you were supposed to use one of the other half dozen conf files it has spread all across your drive. Is it under /etc/, /usr/local/etc/, /opt/, or your home directory?

And, in the meantime, you’ll only destroy your OS maybe a few dozen times!

There are existing standards. The issue is that there are too many different standards and some programs will choose to make their conf files half standardized, half unique.

There’s INI, YAML, JSON, XML, TOML, etc.

Honestly, the Linux team needs to just choose one of these formats, declare it the gold standard, and slowly migrate the config files for most core components over to it. By declaring a standard, you’ll eventually get the developers of most major third-party tools and components to eventually migrate.

Everyone knows you just keep guessing until you get it right.

Don’t worry about how janky or slow it makes the UI. That’s basically a requirement for the modern browser.

I mean, Washington wanted 2 terms to be the norm.

He didn’t, that’s just a whitewashed version we tell ourselves.

He just didn’t want the President to be viewed as a monarch or a lifetime appointment. He turned down a third term because he feared he would die in office and the public would believe that’s the norm.

Whiteknife: Do you remember that movie we did with Johnny Morton? You were the Sheriff, and I was some generic Indian?

Howard: Hey come on, don’t say that. Tallhand Mudlake could talk to horses. You played him with grace and dignity. It was a great role for you!

W: Morton played a rancher who owned half of Missouri. And what happens when the cattle ranchers have more power than the Sheriff?

H: The whole town burns down.

W: The whole town burns down. Right. Vault-Tec is a trillion-dollar company that owns half of everything, and after ten years of war the US Government is broker than a joke. The cattle ranchers are in charge, Coop. Unless the People do something about it.

H: I guess everything’s a conspiracy, right? Come on man, you sound like you’re in a cult.

W: And you’re sitting here defending a system that’s ready to set the world on fire, Cooper. Maybe you’re the one in the cult.

If you want a smart vacuum but don’t want to lose your privacy or be reliant on a cloud service, Valetudo is the way to go.

Also got GLaDOS on my Z10 Pro!

Love Valetudo - it integrates so well with HA and is entirely local.

Apparently it’s Athena Linux. At least, that’s what the hackable vacuums use.

WebRTC could be used to provide peer-to-peer streaming. The load on the servers would be very minimal since the feeds would be sent directly from the host to the viewers. A lot of live streaming and video conferencing apps already use it to keep their hosting costs down.

The downside is that the IP address of the viewers will be exposed, even over a VPN unless precautions are taken by the user or the application.